The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  Yet there was a further interesting resemblance between the two rulers despite their opposing personal morality. Both the Queen–Empress and the Tsarina encountered that familiar problem for a reigning female, the need to exert military leadership, or at least some kind of leadership in war (although the Russian Empire, unlike Austria, had known the rule of other women autocrats, including Catherine’s own mother-in-law Elisabeth). In both cases, they made use of the skilful technique of Elizabeth I, putting on a show of glory, in which the appealing femininity was artfully contrasted with stern and indeed noble patriotic resolve. And neither of them, despite presiding over military victories, had that heroic love of war for its own sake which has marked so many male rulers: Louis XIV, who boasted in 1662 that glory was the principal aim of all his actions, recommended his great-grandson on his deathbed half a century later, ‘Do not imitate my love of war.’7

  The first challenge to Maria Theresa occurred when Frederick the Great of Prussia snatched her province of Silesia only seven weeks after her father’s death. To Carlyle, this act of territorial rape, contrary to Frederick’s promised word, was merely the Prussian King grabbing bravely at Opportunity as at a wild horse: ‘rushing hitherward, swift, terrible, clothed with lightning like a courser of the gods; dare you catch him by the thunder-mane and fling yourself upon him …’ Many may prefer the cooler estimate of Macaulay concerning the War of the Austrian Succession: ‘The selfish rapacity of the King of Prussia gave the signal to his neighbours. The whole world sprang to arms …’ (We might forgive Carlyle for his blithe cruelty towards one Warrior Queen, for the sake of that bright suggestion made to the young Miss Jane Welsh that Boadicea would be the ideal subject for her initial ‘literary effort’, with the comforting rider that ‘she need not be “big” or “grim” unless you like’ – except for the fact that bigness and grimness were the qualities that Carlyle evidently admired.)8

  The young Maria Theresa was hailed as Queen of Hungary by her loyal subjects in that country, or rather by an oxymoron of a title – domina et rex noster (our mistress and our king), another variant of that familiar theme of gender transference. In her beleaguered state, the domina–rex was at least armed with one important weapon in the shape of an infant male heir; and she was quick to play upon the appealing possibilities of the image of the Warrior Queen as Young Mother. Sending a picture of herself and the child to General Khevenmüller in 1742 just after he had taken Munich on her behalf, Maria Theresa wrote this accompanying letter: ‘Dear and faithful Khevenmüller – Here you behold a queen who knows what it is to be forsaken by the whole world. And here also is the heir to her throne. What do you think will become of this child?’9 The next day the troops at Linz were shown both the picture and the letter, amid outbursts of wild enthusiasm.

  At her coronation at Pressburg (Bratislava) in Hungary Maria Theresa mounted a huge black charger, and according to immemorial custom drew her sword to the four points of the compass, to signify her role as Hungary’s protector. This was once again Elizabeth I at Tilbury, making the show stand for the substance, especially as Maria Theresa had to learn to ride astride specially for the event: furthermore, she had only just over a month in which to do so (following the invitation to Pressburg) and was in the process of recovering from the birth of her first son. Thereafter Maria Theresa continued to enjoy all the spectacles of military life such as reviews, parades and manoeuvres in which she could similarly display herself. She designed a uniform for herself and her ladies on these occasions which combined the practical chamois leather breeches and boots of the rex beneath, with the voluminous skirts of the domina above.

  None of this amounted to a predilection for warmongering. The frequent battles she had to fight were more likely to be in defence of her own inheritance than in pursuit of others’. Indeed the Queen (in her own right) and Empress (by virtue of her husband’s election) displayed on occasion a consciousness of the sheer immorality of national aggression which seems to have been rooted in her own personal piety. When the Polish Partition of 1772 was first suggested, Maria Theresa protested against the robbing of an innocent nation ‘that it has hitherto been our boast to protect and support’, adding ‘The greatness and strength of a state will not be taken into consideration when we are called to render our final account.’ Towards the end of her life the Empress protested vehemently against Austria’s attempt to annex Bavaria: ‘Let them call me a coward, a weakling, a dotard if they like [she was approaching sixty], nothing shall prevent me from extricating Europe from this perilous situation.’ Afterwards she said: ‘For me it is an inexpressible happiness to have prevented a great effusion of blood.’

  More symbolic of her personal style than the image of the young Queen on the black charger at the beginning of the reign, is that presented by the statue erected in the nineteenth century opposite the Hofburg in Vienna. Here the Empress – ‘the General and first Mother of the said Dominions’, as she described herself – is seen presiding like an enormous benevolent muffin in her long dress and ceremonial robes (there is no glimpse of those practical chamois leather breeches and boots).10 All about her, at the four corners of the statue, prance on horses, her male generals and ministers, both smaller and more active.

  Unlike Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great did have, it is true, a penchant towards glory. When she told her adoring correspondent Voltaire in 1771 that ‘the nation’s glory is my own, that is my principle’,11 she summed up an intelligent philosophy which explained how she had come to rule the unwieldy Russias so successfully for the last nine years. This little German Princess had loved rough games as a child, hating to be fobbed off with dolls and cots instead of riding and shooting birds with the local children. As the unheeded bride of the Grand Duke Peter – their marriage was not consummated for nine years – she took her chief pleasure in riding, even in bed, by her own account, where she galloped away her frustration as ‘a postilion on my pillow’.12 When the Tsarina Elisabeth protested that riding like a man on a flat saddle led to sterility, the neglected wife replied pointedly that the more violent the exercise, the more she liked it. As Tsarina herself, Catherine put this caged energy to good use.

  The coup against Catherine’s husband, who had succeeded as the Tsar Peter III at the beginning of 1762, took place six months later. It was ten o’clock of the light northern night on 29 June, according to the Russian style of dating; there was thus scarcely any darkness to shroud the startling spectacle of the Grand Duchess Catherine, dressed in uniform, at the head of the rebel regiments whose members including prominently her current lover Grigory Orlov and his brother. When these rebels – disgusted by the Tsar’s pro-German policies – had come for Catherine, she had borrowed the green and red uniform of a young officer, Captain Talietzin, in the Semeonovsky regiment, who was slight enough for his clothes to fit her. Her lady-in-waiting Princess Dashkova took the uniform of another young officer, Lieutenant Poushkin. According to the Princess’s memoirs, it was she, Dashkova, who suggested that her mistress should now substitute the Order of St Andrew for that of St Catherine worn over her uniform: the order of St Andrew was theoretically worn only by the reigning sovereign, and the substitution was thus a dramatic gesture indicating the assumption of command.13

  ‘For a man’s work, you needed a man’s outfit’ was Catherine’s official explanation for her masculine attire14 (although since she had been accustomed to steal out of her palace in man’s costume to meet her lover Stanislaus Poniatowski, it could clearly be used for a woman’s work as well). The former tomboy easily mounted the mettlesome grey stallion brought for her use and mastered it. With her drawn sword and her long flowing hair beneath her black three-cornered hat lined with sable and decorated with oak leaves, the symbols of victory, Catherine now presented a very passable goddess of war at the head of her troops. The loyalty inspired by the sight was epitomized when a young NCO rushed forward to present her with a pennant for her naked sword. His name was Grigory Potemkin.

  Du
ring her long reign, her triumphant progress towards military victories galore – she listed seventy-eight of them – Catherine never failed to present herself wherever possible in the same heroic light. When the French diplomat the Comte de Ségur first saw her in 1785, he found her ‘richly attired, her hand resting on a column’. Her majestic air, the pride in her expression and her ‘slightly theatrical pose’ so took him aback that he forgot his speech of welcome. So successful was this projection that the portrait painter Madame Vigée Le Brun, meeting her during a tour of Russia, was amazed to discover that the Tsarina was actually very short: ‘I had fancied her prodigiously tall, as high as her grandeur’.15

  Ségur described her in the course of that triumphal procession to Kiev of 1787 arranged by Potemkin, following the defeat of Turkey and Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, which brought her both the fruitful steppes of the south and an invaluable access to the Black Sea. Stout and tiny in her military uniform, she was nevertheless ‘a conquering empress’, The descendants of the Tartars who had once swept across this territory (putting an end to the Georgian empire of Tamara) now prostrated themselves before ‘a woman and a Christian’.16 When a Georgian prince from Colchis brought presents to the foot of the Russian Tsarina Catherine’s throne, it might be argued that the memory of Queen Tamara, in her sex if not her nationality, had been avenged.

  Catherine, like Tamara six centuries before, understood how to make use of that deep mystical Slavic feeling towards the mother goddess, as well as the conquering goddess of war. To Orlov she was ‘little mother’ as well as ‘most merciful sovereign lady’. To the later lover Potemkin she was ‘Mother Tsarina Catherine … far more than a mother to me … my benefactress and my mother’. On the other hand, like Queen Elizabeth I, she did not consider that she belonged (unlike most mothers) to the ‘weak, frivolous, whining species of women’; in this respect she was certainly the Warrior Queen as an honorary male. When Catherine founded an orphanage, for example, she ordered that the girls should learn to cook and make bread, following the much praised women of the Bible and those hard-working ones celebrated by Homer17 (by which she definitely did not mean the Bible’s sword-wielding Judith or Homer’s flashing-eyed Athene, felling the war-god Ares with a stone).

  At her accession, in fact, Catherine suffered from the same prudent dislike of war as Elizabeth I and for the same reason: the debts incurred by Russia during the Seven Years’ War, which ended a year later in 1763. Even in 1770, after a successful campaign against the Turks, Catherine believed peace to be a fine thing, though she now admitted that war also had its ‘fine moments’.18

  Voltaire’s correspondence with Catherine concerning the Turks was on a far more rambunctious level and there is a nice flavour of chivalry too: ‘these barbarians deserve to be punished by a heroine for the lack of respect they have hitherto had for ladies’, he wrote to the Tsarina in November 1768, a month after war had been declared by the Turks. ‘Clearly, people who neglect all the fine arts and who lock up women, deserve to be exterminated.’ A year later he was admonishing his ‘Semiramis’ and his ‘Northern Star’ in still more ardent terms: ‘Come now, heir to the Caesars, head of the Holy Roman Empire, defender of the Latin Church, come now, this is your chance.’ When there was news of a victory, he described himself as jumping out of bed in ecstasy: ‘Your Imperial Majesty has brought me back to life by killing the Turks.’ Voltaire’s subsequent salute was a weird parody of the language of religion: for he began by crying ‘Allah! Catherine!’ and went on to sing ‘Te Catharinam laudamus, te dominam confitemur’.19

  Catherine herself had a more controlled appreciation of these tumultuous events. Did they serve the interest of Russian greatness (with which of course she identified herself)? That was her persistent concern. She had her own well-developed sense of Russian national pride – Russia, the country she had so successfully adopted. Not only did she display a taste for operas which celebrated Russian history, she also littered the imperial grounds at Tsarskoe Selo with monumental reminders of Russian military triumphs including obelisks and marble columns as well as war memorials. In 1771 she agreed with Voltaire that ‘this army will win Russia a name for herself’. But when she declared that ‘great events have never displeased me and great conquests have never tempted me’, the second half of her statement was not quite as disingenuous as the list of her achievements and territorial acquisitions might indicate.20

  Her own nominee on the throne of Poland and some of its territory annexed by Russia, further acquisitions on the Alaskan coast, to say nothing of the defeat of Turkey and Russia’s surge into the Crimea, her revenues mightily increased: all this was brought about by only six years of war in her twenty-five-year reign. Nor, in all this, was Catherine a mere glittering figurehead of a Warrior Queen. Where military and naval matters were concerned, she played an active directing part. Attending twice-weekly meetings of the seven-man council which directed the war during the Crimean campaign, she herself was probably the originator of the daredevil plan whereby the Russian fleet in the Baltic sailed five thousand miles round the coasts of Western Europe to engage the Turks.

  The results of this brilliantly executed expansionist policy for Russia were extraordinary: twenty million subjects owed Catherine loyalty at her coronation, compared to thirty-six million in 1795 shortly before her death. It was however expansion, not war itself with its manufactured heroics, which interested her, even if she could manufacture heroics herself with a will, where necessary. ‘We need population not devastation’: that was her philosophy. In short, as she herself declared, ‘peace is necessary to this vast empire’:21 a perceptive comment on the vast Russian ‘empire’ at any stage of its history.

  Where Warrior Queens are concerned, we return from the users – Maria Theresa and Catherine – to the used – Louise of Prussia. Although described by Napoleon as an ‘Armida’, there was by temperament nothing of Tasso’s ‘wily witch’ and Gluck’s destructive enchantress about Queen Louise of Prussia. ‘Every day I realize that I am a weak woman,’ she wrote during her early carefree years, ‘and I am weak because I am kindhearted. I want everyone to be happy, and so I forgive, forget, and fail to scold when I should …’22

  Like Catherine a minor German princess, Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz possessed, apart from this sweet feminine pliancy, the gift of beauty. On Louise’s exquisite looks there is a remarkable agreement of testimony. In 1793, when she was seventeen, her ravishing appearance captured the heart of Frederick William, the shy young heir to the throne of Prussia: ‘it is she, and if not she, no other creature in the world’, he is reputed to have exclaimed at the mere sight of her (much as Isabella of Castile is supposed to have greeted Ferdinand). A decade later, seeing the Prussian Queen dressed as Statira, the Persian bride of Alexander the Great at a fête in Berlin, Madame de Staël was ‘struck dumb by her beauty’. In 1801 Madame Vigée Le Brun, whose observant painter’s eye was disappointed in the stature of Catherine the Great, alleged that her pen failed her in trying to describe Louise. The Queen happened to be in deep mourning on their first encounter, but her coronet of black jet served only to set off the dazzling whiteness of her complexion; as for the beauty of her ‘heavenly’ face Madame Vigée Le Brun compared it to that of a sixteen-year-old girl, with the perfect regularity and delicacy of the features, the grace of figure, neck and arms: ‘all was enchanting beyond anything imaginable!’23

  In life this perfect regularity of feature and the supple slender figure often led to Queen Louise being compared to a Greek statue. For once, the art by which later generations must judge confirms that does not disappoint: there is something neo-Hellenic about the many representations of her which have survived, enhanced naturally by the clinging Grecian style of contemporary fashion which suited her so well. We can accept with relief the verdict of the English diplomat Sir George Jackson that the Queen was ‘really a beauty and would be thought so even if she did not sit upon a throne’. The chivalry she inspired is equally easy
to understand: ‘among the younger men especially’, wrote Jackson, ‘there prevails a feeling of chivalrous devotion towards her; and a sunny smile, or glance of her bright laughing eyes, is a mark of favour eagerly sought for’.24

  At first it was all lightness at the Prussian court, Frederick William succeeding his father in 1797, four years after his marriage. Perhaps the Queen – who was after all young – danced a little too much (she danced at a court ball in 1803 within hours of giving birth) and she was also lightheartedly unpunctual. There are unpublished passages in the diary of Countess Sophie von Voss, Louise’s battleaxe of a lady-in-waiting (already in her seventies, with a father who fought against Marlborough at Malplaquet) that criticize the Queen’s frivolity and even her petulance in these early years; but Countess Voss’s final verdict was to be very different: ‘all the loveliest virtues of woman and the most pleasing to God’.25

  On the other hand Louise’s surely admirable attempts at enlarging her perfunctory education with a study of German literature, to which more intellectual ladies-in-waiting introduced her, were greeted with boorish mockery by Frederick William. He described one of these intellectuals, Caroline von Berg, as ‘vain, trivial … and forever gushing poetry’. Nor was the reputation of Goethe sacred to the Prussian King. ‘Wha’s ’is name, t’great man from Weimar?’ Frederick William would enquire, aping the local dialect. Another of these ladies, Marie von Kleist, aunt by marriage to the poet and playwright Heinrich von Kleist, persuaded the Queen to patronize her nephew; he received an honorarium under oath of secrecy.26 Schiller became a special favourite: the Queen wanted him as Poet Laureate. She also read Shakespeare in translation.